is more powerful than our goals

Before choosing to narrow down my focus and go all in with my nutrition career, I tried on several different hats in life, along with their associated identities. The most oddly fitted hat was the work I did as an affiliate marketer a few years back.

By affiliate marketing, I’m not referring to the paid partnerships entrepreneurs form with brands in their industry, but moreso that I began to train and build a business solely around online affiliate marketing. I began building an identity as a marketer — or at least I tried to for a while.

I was working overtime as a postpartum doula in San Francisco at this time and barely had space for friends, let alone energy to build something with all the health training I’d aquired. I didn’t feel like I owned ANY of my time and it was starting to wear me down fast. I found myself wanting to run away from my life and create something totally new. I wanted creative agency over my days and the freedom to choose my work environments. These marketers spoke to all of this and gave me a solution: passive income through affiliate marketing.

So I jumped into the deep end of the marketing pool and spent all my evenings and weekends studying affiliate sales funnels and marketing psychology. I began networking with a global community of affiliates, attending marketing seminars, and tried creating an identity around all of this. But the identity never quite stuck, therefore all the goals I’d set for myself never quite stuck either.

In the end, I only had a few successes with my marketing strategies and wasn’t consistent enough to drop my birthwork contracts and go online full-time, let alone make the six figures the marketers were selling us on.

If you look at my marketing goals objectively, you’ll see that they weren’t unattainable. There was a learning curve at first, yet nothing that I couldn’t conquer with the hours I put in. The goals were not the obstacle, the identity I needed to align with was the obstacle.

If you’ve ever spent time within the world of affiliate marketing, you’ll see that marketing is filled with a lot of desperate people, many of whom want out of their current life situations. Goals are a HUGE part of making this happen and terms like “productivity,” “time is money,” and “hustle” are the patented slogans by which many marketers live.

Of course, there are plenty of rad people within the world of affiliate marketing, just as there are rad people everywhere. There was a lot of personal development insights I gleaned from this period and have carried with me. I also made enough affiliate sales as a side hustle to pay off the remainder of my nutrition school debt and get a small taste of what residual income can feel like.

But that is where it ended. My goals as a marketer deteriorated after only a year and I redirected my focus back to my health studies — where my identity was most aligned.

What are goals and why do we set them?

If someone asked you what a goal was, you’d have no problem giving them a quick response. Most of us have participated in goal setting and worked towards something exciting or important in our lives. But after a few years studying coaching, which emphasizes behavioral change, it’s clear that change usually isn’t as simple as setting a goal and working towards it’s fruition.

In fact, I’d say most people struggle immensely with setting goals and with reaching them — for reasons I’ll explain below.

As a refresher: Goals are the result or achievement toward which effort is directed. In other words, goals set our direction. They’re an endpoint which represent a desired feeling, experience, and identity we’re seeking to emulate — whether for a day or for the long-term. Setting goals is so ubiquitous to modern living that we often associate any growth or success in life with this process.

If we have a goal to lose weight, we’ll set a time-frame and a course of actions each day to get us to this desired weight. If we want to move to a new location, we set a date for that move and begin to save, plan, research, etc to prepare us for a successful move.

Goals are useful in that they give us reasons to change our behavior, they give our lives purpose, and they tell us a lot about our values. They can inspire us to become better versions of ourselves and to take needed action in our lives. They also require that we change our daily habits, which I’ll go more into in a minute.

But first, if goals are so great for us, why do we so often fail at meeting them??

The limitations to common goal-setting

I learned years ago that it’s easy to set goals and therefore, everyone does. Most people in competitive arenas live their lives by goals; to win a championship, medal, or a tournament, for instance. And yet, only a few competitors will meet these goals and earn these rewards. Two people with the same goals and potentially even similar lifestyles may have very different outcomes, despite the fact that their goal was the same.

This is due in part to the common mistake we make of focusing on the wrong things and trying to change in the wrong ways in order to meet our goals. Often underappreciated and misunderstood in goal setting is the necessity for an aligned system we can use to get the results we seek. I’m referring to the daily behavior changes required of us and the level of personalization that’s also needed in order to make these changes stick for us as individuals.

I see alignment as an essential component to success, as it’s centered around growing our self-awareness and getting clear on what we stand for– even in periods of change and growth. What will work for Susy will not work for Jake. Alignment means placing ourselves and our daily choices under a microscope and asking ourselves: “Is this behavior moving me in the right direction?”

When setting goals, we’re commonly taught to fixate on the results we seek instead of focusing on the habit-based systems we’ll rely upon to get us there. The habit-based systems are where the magic happens and they’re developed daily by taking one small step after another. Obviously, we still have an end goal, but a more effective focal point are those small steps which add up over time and our habits which dictate these steps.

We use habits to attain our goals, so what’s up with habits?

Habits are the moment-to-moment behavioral choices we make which comprise our days, weeks, months, and years. What differentiates a habit from a deliberate behavior like giving a lecture or learning a new equation is that habits are executed on autopilot. Our brain saves a shit ton of energy by setting up as much of our behavior on autopilot as possible. Habits are the result of this energy-saving autopilot state and they underpin the vast majority of our waking hours.

If we understand and master our daily habits, we can design the personalized system I mentioned above to get us the desired results we’re seeking in our goals. The crucial role habits play in our daily behaviors and overall results in life cannot be overemphasized enough. I recently finished the book Atomic Habits, by James Clear, which blew my mind open on all things habit:

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It’s only when looking back tow, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.”

In the book, he outlines what he calls The Four Laws of Habit Change:

Make it Obvious

Make it Attractive

Make it Easy

Make it Satisfying

Within these four laws, he uses research within fields like behavioral psychology and evolutionary biology to form a framework for understanding and changing human behaviors in a small, yet powerful way each day. The whole purpose of the four laws is to help us understand how we actually operate and to tailor our lives to this understanding for greater success.

Of course, some of our habits are helpful and don’t need to change, but when it comes to healing from chronic illness and destructive behaviors like addictions, we’ll be shocked to realize how many habits we have which deter or even harm us each day. Once we realize this, having a solid system in place to assess and modify our daily choices becomes a great sense of relief.

As a species with a tremendous drive towards self-identity, when we begin seeking alignment, we’ll start to see how our daily habits shape our identity and vice versa. Since we all want to love who we are, this can be a powerful incentive for habit-change! It also provides opportunities for us to grow in self-awareness and objective reasoning as we dial in our daily habits towards greater alignment with our identity.

Why identity-based habits are so powerful

The greatest example I’ve found for changing daily habits is one James outlines in his book, known as Identity-Based Habits. Using this system, we’ll look at behavioral change as an onion with three layers — as illustrated to the left. The most superficial layer of this onion is based on the outcomes we wish to change; the goals themselves. This is the layer most people focus and get hung up on, but is also the layer least linked to long-term change.

The second layer is the process by which we enact changes and strive towards the goals. This includes changing our daily habits, routines, environments, relationships, etc. This is a more effective layer to be working on because it deals directly with our habits and all that’s holding them up. This layer looks at every little thing contributing to the automated dance that is our daily life.

However, the most effective layer and the one that changes us from the roots is working at the level of our identity. This is the layer where we’ll be examining our core values, beliefs, biases, fears, biological limitations, and the dreams we often bury. These all make up the fabric of who we identify as and these must be aligned with our goals if we ever wish to meet said goals.

Who we experience ourselves to be each day is the single greatest contributor to our choices and to the trajectory of our lives. It is the reason so many people fill their time escaping into entertainment and addiction; on a deep level we don’t like the experience we’re having of ourselves and have never been given any tools or opportunities to see or admit to this. When making daily choices from this place of avoidance, you can see why it might be so hard to meet goals that others make look so easy when they’re living as the person they love to be.

The role indentiy played in my own health journey

When I was healing my relationship to food and building a daily habit of eating for satiation and health instead of out of addiction or compulsion, I didn’t set a goal of eating in moderation. I also didn’t set any goals around eating certain foods more than others or of no longer eating while emotional or tired. What I did do was create a system for relating to food which was based on becoming someone who doesn’t overeat.

I became someone who values nutrient-dense foods over modern hyper-palatable ones and someone who wants to feel emotionally and physically strong. I became someone who values stability over the dopamine rushes I’d get from binging. In creating this identity, my diet naturally evolved into what it is today: a nutrient-dense, animal-based diet with enough flexibility to feel free, yet an overall emphasis on strength and stability.

When aligning this identity with my choices, it became natural to pay attention to which foods left me feeling crazy, unstable, or addicted, and which foods left me feeling stable, satiated and strong.

The identity piece was huge for me in healing my relationship to food partly because I had to make some scary commitments to myself in the process. I had to commit to being someone who would eat an animal-based diet when the noisey modern world is yelling “plant-based!” I chose to advocate for this way of viewing health and consumption, despite the clients I lost and the misunderstanding I received from people who view animal consumption as negatively.

Aligning our identity with our daily habits is the most effective long-term strategy for behavior change and healing. However, it does come with growing pains and uncertainty. We might be called to change who we spend our time with, how we prioritize sleep and food choices, the topic of conversations we’re willing to engage in, and how we’re willing to make our money.

I also find it liberating as hell to see that our identities still remain flexible as they’re composed of many moving parts (habits) which can be changed when needed. I don’t believe creating a fixed identity is useful long-term and I’m all about long-term wins. However, I do believe that the more aligned we can become in who we are and what we stand for, the easier it will be to control the systems which underpin our success in life.

Aside from going out and reading James’ book I linked in above, my takeaway suggestion for you is to get clear on these things: who do you want to be, what are your core values which will make up this identity, and what are the daily habits you will need to adopt or remove in order to live in alignment with this person? You’re free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

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WHO AM I?

And Why am I relevant?

For those of you curious about who I am and why you might want to join my network, I’ve created this article to give you a bit of context. As a connection-oriented human, I love learning about the people who’s work I follow and messages I align with.

Although I agree that the message can often be more important (universal, even) than the messenger… I’ve always wanted to know more about my messengers. So, here’s more about who I am and why I might be relevant to your life.

My Childhood Recap

Like so many of us today coming from a divided home, my parents divorced when I was eight. What folks closest to me also know is that I was raised in a religious “community” (it was a cult, really) with a handful of other families up until I was about five. My parents raised us largely off-the-grid in Northern California where we were unschooled and sheltered from most media and industrial influence. We moved to the Central coast when I was five and for the following three years, the beach was essentially my classroom.

Sounds like a fairy tale, but it was based on unstable foundations which impacted the health and development of everyone in my family. When my parents divorced, we were all placed in public school for the first time, given tv as a babysitter, and began subsisting off top ramen and wonder bread. But the biggest trauma for us all was that my mom left. I was eight at the time — the middle of five children — and raised primarily by my dad thereafter.

The reason I choose to include this early life detail is because healing and growth involves dealing with unresolved childhood issues. Always. I’ve yet to work with a client who doesn’t have something from their childhood which needs to be acknowledged and respected. Our childhoods are also the birthplace of our character strengths, our core values, and various habit-patterns which have served us along the way. My childhood sounds rocky, but I’ve healed and grown from much of it with these strengths as takeaways:

Independence and driven by internal goals and visions

Ambitious and driven towards meaningful work in the world

Fiercely passionate about the outdoors

Super goofy and able to hold paradox, irony, and contradictions (thanks, dad!)

Socially and emotionally intelligent

Introspective and self-aware

Lover of all things beach, ocean, and redwoods

Highly sensitive and compassionate towards others’ trauma

Personal Health struggles

Again, like so many growing up in Industrial Western Civilization, processed food and tv played big roles in my early years, contributing to the development of various symptoms I assumed were normal. I had severe migraines, intestinal issues, behavioral issues like unstable emotions, tantrums, severe social anxiety, and issues calming down and sleeping.

I channeled all my craziness & emotions into physical activities such as surfing, skateboarding, and basketball. I was raised believing that as long as I remained petit, it was normal to eat any crap I wanted to the point of sickness. So I developed patterns of overeating early in life and thought that was normal also.

By teenage years, I was diagnosed with clinical mood disorders, eczema, acne, bulimia, and went on medications for all of the above. After four years of this, my intuition kicked in and told me that the drugs weren’t the answer. So, I quit all meds, went vegan, and enrolled in a holistic health school in San Francisco. I wanted to understand as much as I could about myself and my struggles and I didn’t know it at the time, but health became one of my core values. I was twenty-one. Some takeaways from my personal health struggles:

Developed most of my core values through these struggles

Became passionate about health sciences and honest applications thereof

Began to see my own symptoms in others’ stories and bodies

Developed a holistic, functional, and evolutionary lens to view health and behavior

Have the personal experience to understand what others are going through

Passionate about healthcare reform from the bottom up!

Early child development Background

In my late teens, I landed a job as a pre-school teacher assistant. I immediately loved this work and went to college for a degree in Early Child Development. Shortly after I moved on to become a full-time preschool teacher, giving people twice my age parenting advice. This work evolved into private nanny, tutor, and special needs contracts, eventually leading into postpartum doula, lactation consulting, and newborn care.

I often joke that I’m better with babies and small children than “big people,” having spent most of my adult life with small developing humans. Throughout my education and career background in this work, I’ve been able to gain invaluable knowledge and wisdom applicable to both my health consulting career and to larger societal issues.

If we want to understand what’s normal for humans, viewing human growth and development through the lens of childhood can be super helpful. If we want to learn how to be free, how to preserve our youthfulness & resliency, to live creatively with a beginners mind… children can teach us these things. Here are some of my early Child development takeaways:

We all have various aspects of our inner child inside

Children can be some of the greatest teachers

All illness and addiction patterns begin in childhood

We all deeply desire creative agency, control, and fun!

We all get socialized to forget what feels good, children help us remember

Trust and emotional connection is CRUCIAL for health

Growth never needs to stop!

Curiosity can be the difference between stagnation and growth

Physical intimacy is what our bodies were built for.

Nutrition Training

I took my first nutrition class in high school and I hated it! I thought it was dry and clinical & it felt irrelevant to my life at the time. It wasn’t until I was forced to face how I felt each day that nutrition became of interest and only years into my health journey did it prove to be the greatest lever I’d use for gauging everything else in my life.

Nutrition and I fell in love, you could say.

As I mentioned above, I was sick a lot as a child and forced to navigate multiple disordered mood and eating patterns as an adolescent. My fascination with health began with modern psychiatry and didn’t become holistic in nature until I hit a wall with the standard medication route.

I attended a year-long holistic health practitioner program at age twenty-one, which gave birth to a new world of holistic thinking for me. This program was a great source of meaning and support for me in my early twenties, yet lacked a lot of foundational science, so I decided to go back to college for a dietetics license. I realized during this period how misguided much of the vegan “education” I’d received earlier on was.

I made it through the required hard science courses of my program, but after realizing how conflicted I felt about what was taught in the licensing program (not holistic!)… I decided to drop out of my program. It was a tough choice, yet I’ve never regretted it! I enrolled in a private holistic nutrition academy and went through a two-year consulting certification program.

Once this program was complete, I followed it up with a year and a half of integrative health coach training to get more coaching and behavioral change skills. In the past few years since, I’ve had several clinician and research mentors and continually reading, listening, researching, and furthering my knowledge-base and understanding of human health. Here’s some takeaways from choosing the path that I did:

I avoided Food Industry influence

I avoided pharmaceutical Industry influence

I had wonderful teachers I respected who walked the walk!

I avoided University bureaucracy

I get to learn from out-of-the-box thinkers

I got the hard sciences first to build a solid foundation

I got the holistic perspective which led me to functional medicine!

I got the behavioral components which are so intrinsic to coaching

I’m forever learning with continuing education!

Evolution and Philosophy of my Work

Over the years, how I choose to apply nutrition has evolved as I have. In the first half of my twenties, I was vegan, vegetarian, and even mostly raw for a while. There were some pros to this way of eating and living for me at the time. For example, I developed habits towards whole foods consumption and I raised my standards towards quality and sourcing. These habits and values remain with me to this day, despite the unsustainability of my vegan years.

Truth be told, my health deteriorated as a vegan and eating animals again was one of the greatest choices I’ve ever made for my health. This truth has greatly influenced my approach to coaching and consulting. Since my mid-twenties, my research has included medical anthropology, history, regenerative agriculture, trauma therapy, and a deeper-dive into the impacts of plant biochemistry on humans.

My current philosophy is an ancestral one and emphasizes an animal-based approach to diet. This approach focuses on removing plant anti-nutrients and toxins when necessary and focusing on the bio-availability of nutrients. My main career focus is on addressing mood and behavior disorders through diet and lifestyle interventions. The deeper I go down this rabbit-hole, the greater I see is the need for animal-based nutrients and the removal of foods which disrupt core biochemical processes.

In my work, I aim to both educate and empower my clients and the world at large in understanding some basics on how our bodies and minds work — drawing from evolution, history, and science as templates. I’m currently getting really excited about emerging fields like epigenetics, nutrigenomics, and the diet-based approaches being used by functional psychiatrists to treat commonly believed “incurable” mental health disorders. Some core aspects of my work:

Connects the dots between ancestral wisdom and modern science

Encourages Inner Child work and addresses early-life traumas

Emphasis placed on nose-to-tail animal consumption

Emphasis placed on questioning common nutrition myths

Emphasis on elimination diets

Both educating and empowering

Takes environment, nature, and community into account

Constantly evolving with science and knowledge-base growth

Always functional, root-cause oriented

Encourages everyone to be their own health journalist!

Ok, now that you all know more about me, I’d love to hear from you! what can you relate to in my story? What would you like to hear more about? There’s so much to learn and share — let’s keep this conversation going!

The quickest path to an Eating Disorder

I still remember the look in my friend’s dad’s eyes as he handed me my first warning. He was the only adult to see my trajectory before I could see it myself and I’ll forever remember this. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a gift I was able to unwrap at the time and it took me years of hell before I could look back at his words with gratitude.

His daughter wasn’t a close friend — she was a friend of a friend I’d see no more than a handful of times. Her dad ran a successful construction company and had a work event in LA, so he took his daughter and two friends for an all-expenses-paid long weekend.

He’d lived through a near-death open-heart surgery and was my first experience of a spiritual person; aligned in values and actions, committed to seeing and loving those in his life while he was here. My two friends and I were all trapped within similar obsessions; boys, body image, and external validation seeking. But I was the only one on a fad diet at fourteen years old.

Although this culture has a lot of problems contributing to body dysmorphia and disorderly eating, this article focuses exclusively on the biological and psychological patterns created by fad dieting. I created my own prison by setting up patterns within my biology and psychology which took years to understand and dismantle. This is something that I believe young women can avoid if they’re equipped with the knowledge to make personal choices from a place of awareness and empowerment instead of dogma.

I remember going out to lunch at a steak-house on our last day in LA during this weekend. I ordered a grilled chicken salad with a slice of lemon for dressing. No added carbs or fat. I remember thoroughly wiping oil off the chicken strips with a napkin — a ritual I damn near perfected by the age of seventeen.

When normal and common get confused

This steak-house trip was the last meal my friend’s father would witness me pick at. When he asked me what I was doing, I informed him that I was on a diet. He looked into my eyes and said “be careful with that.”

This was the best foresight I’d ever received growing up. This just shows how badly I needed to be seen and guided during such a vulnerable time in life. This man spent one weekend with me, didn’t know anything about me, and yet he knew that I was playing with fire by restrictive dieting as an already-slim thirteen year old girl.

An epidemic of Disorderly Eating

Almost half of American children between 1st – 3rd grade want to be thinner and half of nine and ten year old girls are dieting. NINE YEARS OLD. Unfortunately I know this to be true because I was one of these girls; obsessing over my leg size at the age of nine, despite never having a weight issue!

The South Carolina Department of Mental Health estimates that 8 million Americans (seven million women and one million men) have an eating disorder. Eating disorder statistics provided by the National Eating Disorder Association are even higher, and indicate that 10 million American women suffer from eating disorders. Ten-fifteen percent of all Americans suffer from some type of serious eating disorder.

Seventy-seven percent of individuals with eating disorders report that the illness can last anywhere from one to fifteen years or even longer in some cases. Two to three in one hundred American women suffers from bulimia. As many as ten percent of college women suffer from a clinical or nearly clinical eating disorder, and this is the women that actually seek treatment. My guess is that the numbers are actually MUCH higher.

Thirty-five percent of “occasional dieters” progress into pathological dieting, (disordered eating) and as many as twenty-five percent advance to developing full-blown eating disorders. The incidence of bulimia in 10-39 year old women TRIPLED between 1988 and 1993. What is causing this increase??

Enter Fad dieting

An estimated 45 million Americans go on a diet each year and Americans spend an average of $33 billion each year on weight loss products. And yet, nearly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, despite this trend towards perpetual dieting. Ninety-five percent of diets fail and most Americans will regain their lost weight within one to five years. Seventy percent of American women surveyed endorse unhealthy thoughts, feelings, or behaviors related to food or their bodies and ninety-one percent of women recently surveyed on a college campus had attempted to control their weight through dieting. Twenty-two percent of women in this survey dieted “often” or “always”.

I don’t offer these statistics to overwhelm you with numbers (which could easily be erroneous since so many of these struggles remain untreated) but to give you perspective on the scope of this modern epidemic. This article also isn’t aimed at addressing the obesity epidemic. This article’s aimed to address the young impressionable women who catch fad dieting like a disease which shapes their lives and self-worth for years, with potential catastrophic impacts on their biological and mental health.

I don’t believe that Fad Dieting is the only contributing factor to the development of an eating disorder. However, I will say from examining the statistics and from living through this struggle firsthand, that it is often a huge factor. Let me elaborate by breaking down what a fad diet is.

Fad: a temporary fashion, notion, manner of conduct, etc., especially one followed enthusiastically by a group. Diet: such a selection or a limitation on the amount a person eats for reducing weight. The whole gist is that being thin is the top priority AND there’s a specific formula (diet) to get you to Thin Town. It doesn’t matter if you’re already thin or that your weight is a result of your overall metabolic function because there’s enough social proof (fad) to verify that this solution works!

I chose this Webster’s definition for diet because the other two describe diet as “food choices made to cure or address specific illnesses or health goals.” Personalized diets designed to address health goals isn’t what this article’s about.

Unfortunately a side-effect of living in a culture where junk food is normalized is that many people avoid healthier choices out of fear they might “catch” disorderly eating if they do. As if Orthorexia was a common bug we might catch if we start learning about how our own bodies relate to food.

I speak with women regularly who struggle with health symptoms but refuse to change their food choices because their fear of orthorexia is so great. This is a valid concern if you look at the statistics above, but living with chronic symptoms disrupting your daily life isn’t sustainable either.

We need to get our intentions straight

It’s unfortunate that being healthy has become a billion dollar industry and the only way for this industry to keep selling food bars and diet books is if we all keep succumbing to the propaganda. The whole industry benefits from our confusion and fear around how our own bodies work. You could potentially take even the most useful dietary theory and turn it into a religion tailored to everyone and no one. This is a recipe for an eating disorder.

So this begs the question, then: How do we know whether our dieting behaviors are empowering us or creating neuroticism and disorder? Let’s look at evolution and science.

Functional and evolutionary perspectives towards dieting and health

When I was twenty-four I wrote an email to the author and environmental activist, Derrick Jensen. Touched by his books and ability to tie together personal trauma with larger cultural issues, I shared my eating disorder story with him. I was surprised when he sent me a very thoughtful and lengthy response, in which he referred to my eating disorder as “a disease of civilization.”

A fad strikes me as different in nature than tailoring personal food choices to heal from a known illness. An unfortunate side-effect of living in a culture where junk food is normalized is people avoiding healthier choices out of fear they might”catch” disorderly eating through their newfound discretions. As if Orthorexia was a common bug flying around.

I speak with women regularly who struggle with health symptoms, yet refuse to address their diets because the fear of neurosis is so big. It’s a real and valid concern if you look at the statistics above, and yet living with chronic symptoms and a lower quality of life is no solution.

As a health-conscious vegan of twenty-five, my body had deteriorated so that I was forced to reexamine my dogmatic beliefs towards animal consumption. Despite plenty of expert advice and bodily queues, I spent years denying that my body could need something outside the scope of what my fad diet offered (in my case, vegan was the fad.)

I managed to get a free thirty-minute consult with Julia Ross, the prolific psychotherapist known as one of the first experts to team up with dietitians and use food and amino acid therapy to heal mood disorders, eating disorders, and addictions. Her success rate was groundbreaking and continues to work miracles.

In looking back, I’m not sure what’s crazier; the fact that I was able to get a consult at all OR that I was unwilling to take her expert advice! In fact, I resented her advice. I was a strict vegan at the time, living in a yoga ashram which forbid meat consumption. In my consult, she told me that in order to heal my impulsive eating, disorderly moods, and unstable energy I would need to eat more animal protein. I was so angry at this suggestion I almost hung up on her!

stop telling me what I don’t want to hear!

Julia wasn’t the only health professional to make this suggestion to me. Another therapist specializing in ED recovery said the same thing during a consult, followed by a naturopath a year later. The naturopath pleaded with me to add meat into at least 10% of my diet after viewing my lab results showing severe hypoglycemia I told myself they were all crazy and continued to struggle with binging and mood swings for years.

It got to the point where my my struggles included severe insomnia, amenorrhea, fatigue, anxiety, cravings, binges, digestive issues, and perpetual foggy thinking. The idea that maybe these professionals weren’t so crazy finally began to take root. I found myself in my first real functional medicine clinic, receiving lab results showing that my vegan diet of kale juice, almond butter, sprouted beans and rice was deteriorating my biology… and worse still — it was making me act like a crazy person! This was information my body and behaviors had been telling me for years, but here’s the thing, guys:

eating disorders are often the results of a diet, belief system, and culture which aren’t aligned with what we need on a personal level.

Getting labs done is a great way to see what your fad diet is REALLY doing to your body

Unless we’re willing to admit that our dietary dogma might be wrong, we probably won’t heal. After I began eating animals again, it took a few years of tinkering in the dark and struggling with guilt and self-doubt before I began to feel like myself again. I’d lived with unaddressed chronic symptoms for so long that it was like finding the person I’d never had the strength to be.

Once I started feeling better, I became invested in the history and science living in my own biological story. I wanted to understand what Derrick Jensen meant with his term “diseases of civilization.” I realized I wasn’t alone in my struggles because this eating disorder wasn’t just personal — it was cultural.

Over time, my approach to my own health evolved and continues to evolve. I found Nourishing Traditions and sank my teeth into the brilliant work of Weston A. Price and other professionals studying health and behavioral sciences. It became more clear over time just how damaging my early fad diets of fat-free cottage cheese, turkey bacon, and dry toast had been on my already fragile body and mind.

Over the past four years, I’ve grown more accustomed to calling my broader approach to health Ancestral or Evolutionary Medicine. This is the practice of combining evolutionary sciences with what modern biochemistry is telling us about how nutrition works in the human body. We examine the root-cause of modern chronic illness and maladaptive coping behaviors (like eating disorders and addictions) and we ask ourselves how might modern industrial diets and lifestyles (including fad diets) be contributing to these illnesses and behaviors?

I discovered medical clinicians working within the framework called functional medicine who were getting serious results with their patients through this ancestral approach to diet and lifestyle medicine. I also found countless stories of disorderly eating struggles being treated through similar diets along with things like trauma therapy, mindfulness practices, nature exposure, and community support. As I began to see consistent improvements with my own symptoms and eating behaviors, my lab results correlatively got better. And I naturally let go of the dogmatic world of dieting.

But let me return to those early stages of transition in my mid-twenties again for a minute…

By age twenty-five, I was already dabbling with meat consumption, but this usually involved an impulsive late-night bistro trip with me desperately shoveling lamb into my mouth where no one could see me. I was so unaware (or in denial) of my own biological animal drives that this impulsive behavior was seen as a shameful personal weakness instead of a dietary misalignment.

Want to know the worst way to eat, friends? In secret.

But this is exactly what most fad diets silently endorse through the unsustainable nature of their methods. Our species spent most of our history with the constant threat of food-scarcity. We are beautifully designed with the primal drive to eat as much food as possible when it’s available to us, especially if we’re imbalanced. If we’re missing core nutrients (protein, anyone?)… this drive isn’t going to go away simply because the health industry offers us some restrictive solutions based on … numbers or dogma.

In his book The Hungry Brain, Dr. Stephen Guyenet — leading researcher on body fatness, obesity, and appetite regulation — describes how humans innately relate to food… and it doesn’t involve numbers. He speaks directly to the fad diet phenomenon and why it is that people have initial success with calorie-restricting diets and why this success is generally short-lived. Although calories are burnt and stored as energy and we will lose weight when burning more calories than we eat, the calorie game alone is a very dangerous game to play for biological and psychological reasons.

Focusing on numbers is a great path to neurosis

Biologically, calories aren’t equal and some of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet have a higher calorie content — which get utilized for crucial bodily functions. Psychologically, when we relate to our bodies and our food in numbers, we begin to behave in neurotic and maladaptive ways, which is where eating disorders begin to take shape.

Unfortunately, modern living does require that we navigate daily environments which trip up our ancient “eat it all now” wiring. Therefore, we do need to be selective with what we choose to eat each day. This natural wiring is stronger than the solutions given in fad diets so following these diets without understanding this wiring will only create inner-conflict.

In fact, this is what I see fad diets creating; lives of daily inner-conflict.

In Closing

At this point I hope I’ve painted a clear picture as to why following ANY fad diet (even one which offers healthy food options) without first understanding of our own human bio/spycho/spiritual needs can be devastating to our health and long-term success — especially for young women. I can’t emphasize that last point enough; young women are at the greatest risk of developing an eating disorder or body dysmorphia in this culture. It is our responsibility to support those younger than us in navigating a culture which unfortunately profits greatly from insecurity and self-ignorance.

I believe it’s my personal responsibility as both a health coach and as a refugee of the fad dieting hell realms to support women in understanding that fad diets don’t work. They are prisons.

If you combine the scientific methodology of functional medicine with an evolutionary perspective, you’ll end up asking better questions about eating disorders and how to both avoid and treat them. If you work with a clinician or allied provider, you won’t be doing this work alone and can address your body dysmorphia and eating patterns with someone who has the bigger picture and your whole being in mind.

Obviously, unwrapping an eating disorder and separating ourselves from the cultural dogma which we’r all immersed in is not as simple as just reading some articles and calling it a day; it’s personal and complex. I hope this article speaks to someone who struggles with dieting and/or disorderly eating. Share it with anyone who might benefit. And please reach out to me personally or in the comments if you have thoughts.

Because the best health insurance is on your plate

The deeper down I go into this ever-changing world of health science and nutrition, the greater the need I see for basic knowledge of how our own bodies work and relate to food to be the norm.

Superficially speaking, eating “healthy” seems so simple that it gets promoted with slogans such as “you are what you eat,” “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” “eat __ servings of fruits and veggies every day for optimal health,” … and so on. Most of us get the connection between eating healthy, being healthy, and our overall quality of life.

But if you look a bit deeper, you might begin wonder what constitutes for healthy in a culture as complex and polarizing as ours? Who’s body are we talking about when we give and receive health advice and why is one food “healthy” while another food unhealthy?

Most of us also hear terms like “junk food” and “health food” and can see clear distinctions between the two; a salad vs. McDonald’s, something processed vs. something whole. But what about when someone eats something with less clear distinctions from a health perspective — such as meat vs. soy or cooked food vs. raw? And why the fuck should it matter?

Here’s why it matters: because few of us eat a food just once. We’re all creatures of habit and we tend to choose the same foods day after day, year after year. This accumulated fuel (food) and repetitive consumption habits dictate how every cell in our body operates — thus altering who we are, inside and out. If we understand the basics of what our bodies need and cater our food choices to these basic needs, now we’ve got creative control over who we are, inside and out!

Obstacles To Health

I see some big modern obstacles to making smart nutrition a daily norm — especially for those of us seeking recovery from complex chronic illness, or even simply premature aging. We all want to feel and look our best while regaining the functions illness may have stolen from us. But these obstacles can keep us cycling through the same symptoms, year after year.

So before I dive into the nutrition basics everyone ought to know, I’d like to label these obstacles and offer basic solutions to make healthy choices from in spite of it all.

Obstacle #1: We live in a culture (industrial civilization, that is) which endorses pseudo “foods” and lifestyle behaviors which are antithetical to healing and optimal gene expression. Therefore our appetites often don’t function properly and our environments are working against us on a micro and macro level each day.

Obstacle #2: Access to whole, healthy foods is a class issue. Dirty Capitalism places profits over health and this impacts lower classes first and foremost, making it harder for economically challenged people to access healthy foods easily.

Obstacle #3: We live in a time where science is being manipulated and influenced by religious dogma and by corporate incentives. This often leaves us either mistrusting all health rhetoric or being led astray by misleading articles and poorly reported studies.

Obstacle #4: There are too many humans alive these days with so many different biochemical needs that we fall into assuming what works for someone else must work for us. But our bodies need individualized care, even amongst siblings.

Obstacle #5: Our culture seriously lacks an evolutionary template or historical context to place our health challenges in. We aren’t taught to systems think, leaving it much harder to make educated health and diet decisions without a well-rounded reference point.

In response to these obstacles I created some action steps to take to set solid foundations for applying what I’m about to teach you.

Solution #1: Consider the most crucial and initial step in applying nutrition basics to your life is EATING WHOLE FOODS. This includes both plants and animals and should exclude anything in a box with an ingredients list longer than a few items you can recognize. ONLY WHOLE FOODS.

Solutions #2: Be very selective in who and where you receive nutrition and health information from. Consider that very little in science is as simple as A–>B and most studies in health and nutrition offer us correlative results, NOT CAUSATION. Keep in mind two things: 1) science journalists only get paid if articles get clicked on and shared and this happens through dramatic headlines and oversimplifications, and 2) much of our dietary recommendations were born out of industrial and religious propaganda and may not be true for you.

Solution #3: Seek assistance if you need. Research which foods are OK to buy conventionally. Look at where you’re spending $ that could go towards your health. Remember, our genetic inheritance is JUST as important as a house or car. Prioritize healthy food and lifestyle choices above entertainment, material belongings, and distraction.

Solution #4 Once you understand the basic essential nutrients all human bodies must get from food, you can start paying attention to which ones you may need more of than others. And it’s important to keep in mind that just as your fingerprints are totally unique, your biological needs are totally unique.

Solution #5: Adopt an evolutionary lens to view your health and behavior. Start asking yourself questions which require that you learn about evolution and history to find answers. Keep a bigger picture and remember that we need more than modern epidemiology to understand what’s healthy. We need more than studies being done on modern humans and rats because most of what is modern didn’t exist a century ago and came to be through the function of many systems.

Why Some Nutrients Are Essential

Essential nutrients are called essential because we must get them from our food or supplementation; our bodies cannot produce them on their own. Once upon a time when our soil was fertile and free from pesticides and depletion, we were able to get more nutrients from soil-grown wild vegetables and animals and so we evolved with bodies that expect this. However, after thousands of years of tilling our soil, our modern use of pesticides, and our consumption of a few low-nutrient mono-crops, we’re no longer able to get the same amount of nutrients from the plants and animals we eat.

Therefore, modern humans must make an intentional effort to assure we’re getting these essential nutrients through good food sourcing, nutrient-dense choices, and supplementing when necessary. I also believe it’s important that we see clearly and understand our own religious and emotional biases towards certain foods over others and the ways this may be keeping us nutrient-deficient and sick.

Essential Minerals

Minerals play important roles in sooo many things! Maintaining blood pressure, fluid & electrolyte balance, and bone health, making new cells; delivering oxygen to cells, and contributing to normal muscle and nerve functioning. Minerals are widely distributed in foods, with specific minerals being found higher in certain foods. By eating a variety of nutrient-dense foods, we’re more likely to have a mineral-rich diet. I DON’T recommend eating foods synthetically fortified with Iron or calcium, as it is usually poorly absorbed, of questionable quality, and usually found in industrial foods I don’t recommend you eat anyway.

Two minerals of particular importance are calcium and iron. Unfortunately, many Americans do not consume enough iron or calcium — despite common beliefs about overconsumption of dairy and red meat, we’re actually eating less of those things than ever before. Calcium is needed for the formation of strong bones and teeth from birth through adulthood. Calcium is found in dairy – milk, cheese, and yogurt, mustard greens, kale, broccoli and select legumes. If you follow a paleo (ish) diet or just don’t do well with dairy, I recommend that you supplement with a good quality bone meal calcium supplement and consume bone-in sardines weekly, along with bone broth, and even consuming some of the softer bones from the poultry you eat.

Iron is part of hemoglobin in red blood cells and myoglobin in muscle cells. So iron helps to carry oxygen from the lungs to working cells throughout the body. Iron deficiency, the most common nutrient deficiency worldwide, results in fatigue, weakness, pallor (pale skin, lips, tongue, palms and mouth), and anemia. Iron is found mainly in meat, poultry, fish, eggs, legumes, greens, and dried fruits. If you eat a vitamin C source and an iron source at the same meal, you can double the amount of iron absorbed. Despite common belief amongst vegetarians, plant-based iron is clinically proven to be far inferior to the active form, heme iron, available in animal sources.

All of the minerals below are crucial and must be obtained through food. After researching each one of these minerals, I’ve come to see that most Americans are deficient in all of these. My recommendation is that you try to add in one of the foods listed next to the nutrient each day to ensure that you have enough. I highlighted the macrominerals (which we need in larger quantities) in red and the trace minerals (which we need only traces of) in black.

Essential Vitamins

Vitamins play many crucial roles in our body, such as maintaining healthy eyes, hair, skin, and all basic internal organ functions. They act as antioxidants to protect our cells from damage and to encourage cell turnover, they contribute to healthy reproduction & fertility, to strong bones and normal blood clotting, and to efficient detoxification. They play critical roles in ensuring that our methylation processes work and proper enzymes get produced, and so much more. Different vitamins are found in foods from both plants and animals and by eating a variety of nutrient-dense ancestral foods, you’ll have a vitamin-rich diet.

Essential Amino Acids

Amino acids contribute to the development of protein within the body and are vital in promoting wound repair and encouraging healthy tissue in muscles, bones, skin and hair. Amino acids are also crucial in eliminating waste deposits related to metabolism. Out of the 22 amino acids, there are nine essential amino acids: Isoleucine, Leucine, Lysine, Methionine, Phenylalanine, Threonine, Tryptophan, Valine, and Histidine.

Foods containing all nine of these amino acids are called complete proteins. These complete proteins are essential to our overall health, which is why they are comprised of the essential amino acids. Our bodies need all nine of these essential amino acids for basic health; since our bodies cannot make them naturally, we must get them from other sources, such as food and supplements. The best sources of essential amino acids are animal proteins like meat, eggs and poultry.

histidine – Used to produce histamine, a neurotransmitter that is vital to immune response, digestion, sexual function and sleep-wake cycles. It’s critical for maintaining the myelin sheath, a protective barrier that surrounds your nerve cells

isoleucine – The last of the three branched-chain amino acids, isoleucine is involved in muscle metabolism and is heavily concentrated in muscle tissue. It’s also important for immune function, hemoglobin production and energy regulation

leucine – Like valine, leucine is a branched-chain amino acid that is critical for protein synthesis and muscle repair. It also helps regulate blood sugar levels, stimulates wound healing and produces growth hormones

lysine – Plays major roles in protein synthesis, hormone and enzyme production and the absorption of calcium. It’s also important for energy production, immune function and the production of collagen and elastin

methionine – Plays an important role in metabolism and detoxification. It’s also necessary for tissue growth and the absorption of zinc and selenium, minerals that are vital to your health

phenylalanine – A precursor for the neurotransmitters tyrosine, dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine. It plays an integral role in the structure and function of proteins and enzymes and the production of other amino acids

threonine – A principal part of structural proteins such as collagen and elastin, which are important components of the skin and connective tissue. It also plays a role in fat metabolism and immune function

tryptophan – Needed to maintain proper nitrogen balance and is a precursor to serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates your appetite, sleep and mood

valine – One of three branched-chain amino acids, meaning it has a chain branching off to one side of its molecular structure. Valine helps stimulate muscle growth and regeneration and is involved in energy production

Essential Fats

Fats, including saturated fatty acids, play important roles in the body. These essential fatty acids (EFAs) are based on linoleic acid (omega-6 group) and alpha-linolenic acid (omega-3 group). We need both groups of essential fatty acids to survive. Due to the modern industrial diet of grain and seed oils, there’s a disproportionate intake of omega-6 fatty acids over omega-3 fatty acids, which is correlated with a greater chance of chronic inflammation and all kinds of health .

So it’s important to eat the right foods to make sure that you’re taking in enough and the right kinds of the essential fatty acids. However, there is much more to the story. Studies have shown that increasing the intake of certain essential fatty acids, either alone or in combination with other fats and compounds, can increase health, help in treating certain diseases, and even improve body composition, mental and physical performance. Due to the already high amounts of omega-6 in our diets, I’m going to assume you don’t need to know more about where to source those; they’re in everything processed and grain-heavy. Instead, I will list out the three most important omega-3 EFA which I believe we could all use more of!

ALA (Alpha-Linolenic Acid) – This is the most common omega-3 fatty acid in the diet. ALA is mostly found in plant foods, and needs to be converted into the EPA or DHA before it can be utilized by the human body & this conversion process is inefficient in humans. Only a small percentage of ALA is converted into EPA, and even less into DHA. Another reason why I don’t recommend a vegan diet for any length of time. It’s found in many plant foods, including kale, spinach, purslane, soybeans, walnuts and many seeds such as chia, flax and hemp seeds.

EPA (Eicosapentaenoic Acid) – Its main function is to form signaling molecules called eicosanoids, which play numerous physiological roles. Eicosanoids made from omega-3s reduce inflammation, while those made from omega-6s tend to increase inflammation. For this reason, a diet high in EPA may reduce inflammation in the body and chronic, low-level inflammation is known to drive several common diseases. Several studies have shown that fish oil, which is high in EPA and DHA, may reduce symptoms of depression. Both EPA and DHA are mostly found in seafood, including fatty fish and algae. For this reason, they are often called marine omega-3s.

DHA (Docosahexaenoic Acid) – It’s an important structural component of skin and the retina in the eye and fortifying baby formula with DHA has been clinically proven to improve vision in formula-fed infants. It’s absolutely vital for brain development and function in childhood, as well as brain function in adults. Early-life DHA deficiency is associated with problems later on, such as learning disabilities, ADHD, aggressive hostility and several other disorders. A decrease in DHA during aging is also associated with impaired brain function and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, greater risk of heart disease, and could contribute to type 2 Diabetes and autoimmunity. It’s found in high amounts in seafood, including fatty fish and algae, and grass-fed animal products.

Why Nutrient Bio-availability is so Crucial

Above I outlined all of the best food-sources of nutrients in each category and below I’ve simplified it even more with another list to give you the biggest bangs for your nutrient buck. These are the real Super Foods of the plant and animal kingdom; eaten daily, you’ll be doing more for your health than any pill, juice cleanse, or fad diet could ever do for you.

But first I want to let you in on a crucial aspect to smart nutrition, called nutrient bio-availability.

Bio-availabilityrefers to how much nutrients our human bodies can extract from any given food. Although this varies from person to person depending on gut health, lifestyle stressors, genetics, etc… there are some core reasons why nutrients in foods may not be well-absorbed by people who are aiming to eat healthy.

Some of these reasons involve chemicals we call enzyme inhibitors (these inhibit our bodies’ ability to create the necessary enzymes for breaking down nutrients) and some we call anti-nutrients (these bind to nutrients, altering or eliminating their ability to make it into our cells). These chemicals can be very very problematic for those with damaged guts, autoimmunity, and other chronic health problems. They can also just be an energy drain for everyone else in otherwise decent health.

Identifying and eliminating some main sources of these disruptive chemicals (we cannot remove all of them — they’re in everything!) is what has made all the various versions of the controversial “paleo” movement so successful for so many. This is due to the fact that some of the most harmful of these chemicals live in grains and industrial foods like sugar and vegetable oil. Especially within the autoimmune paleo practice, removing many core sources of these chemicals often reduces and sometimes eliminates entirely, symptoms of autoimmunity.

This involves personalized experimentation with removing a whole host of immunogenic foods and isn’t recommended unless your symptoms are so disruptive that it’s a beneficial trade-off to be this restrictive. For everyone else merely seeking to optimize your health and feel better, knowing which foods might deplete your nutrients and consuming less of these could be a good habit to get into. To give my readers a better idea, here are a few of the main chemicals found in foods which can disrupt our nutrient absorption:

Phytates

Lectins

Goitrogens

Oxalates

Saponins

FODMAPS

The paradoxical truth about these compounds is that they actually act as antioxidants in the human body, providing healthy micro-stressors (hedonic stressors) which can ultimately strengthen our immune systems in low doses. The problem is that so many of us in modern life are both immunocompromised and also nutrient deficient — having been raised on industrially processed nutrient-deficient foods. Therefore, getting these hedonic stressors in mass amounts in each meal has done faaaar more harm than good. This is why I’m not implying we should stop eating all vegetables, grains, or legumes, but to put the breaks on the ones which offer us the lowest nutrients in ratio to their stress-factors.

And lastly, there’s other factors which impact a food’s nutrient bio-availability, such as:

Glycemic Index. If a food is higher glycemic, it will add a stress to your body to manage the glycemic load at each meal and this impacts our abilities to absorb nutrients over time (you cannot absorb nutrients while under stress!)

Histamine Intolerance. This topic deserves another article and will get one. For now, just know know that if you have year-round allergies and allergy-related health symptoms, your body may need a break from high-histamine foods — even the most nutritious ones!

Food intolerances. Such a ubiquitous aspect to modern living! Most of us are lactose-intolerant through genetics alone, and more and more of us are developing numerous other intolerances due to external (environmental) and internal (gut, immunity) factors. These intolerances can make even the most nutritious of foods a source of stress and inflammation in our bodies.

Of course, I’m not recommending that anyone reading this eat only from this list above or that they have to get every one of these foods into their diet each day. These are the foods which were consistently at the top of the list in all of the nutrient research I’ve done. After seeing them repeated over and over, plus running them through a screening to see how many of them passed the bio-availability test… these were the ones that came out relatively on top! Hope this helps.

Take these essential nutrients seriously in your daily life and I guarantee you’ll be visiting the doctor less and less each year and keeping your genetic expression in alignment with your best self!

Why this root-cause approach to healthcare is so effective.

I still remember the gut feeling that came over me while sitting in the dermatologist’s office, speaking to the nurse about how acne forms. She didn’t have any real answers for me, but she did had antibiotics. As a desperate sixteen year old, this gut feeling saying “something’s missing here” was quickly squashed and replaced by the promise implicit in her description of sebum formation.

She explained that oral and topical antibiotics (used indefinitely if needed) would eliminate the bacteria which caused the sebum to form and thus eliminate acne. When I asked her why the problematic bacteria was there to begin with, she responded with “we don’t know.” They didn’t know the root-cause of acne… BUT they did have pills to alleviate my symptoms.

This was the first of many medical visits I’d be making in my teens as part of the battle I waged against my own brokenness. Over the course of the next four years, I’d be taking a whole concoction of pills to fix my attention-span, my obsessiveness, my eczema, depression, and anxiety. From the age of sixteen until my dad’s health insurance ran out at age twenty, I took antibiotics, steroids, anti-depressants, ant-anxiety pills, and eventually prescription methamphetamines to help me get through college.

When we’re not encouraged to look at the root-causes of our illness

And initially these drugs helped. My skin cleared up, I hyper-focused in my classes, and I felt less anxious in the evenings when I would come down off the ADD drugs by popping some Celexa or Lexapro. The anti-depressants didn’t offer much relief and I gave up on those first.

The side-effects from the other drugs started to get progressively worse and eventually that gut feeling which told me something wasn’t right became so loud that I could no longer ignore it. I tapered off all of the drugs and took an extended break from college classes — beginning my journey into the world of holistic healthcare and functional medicine.

This article isn’t about shitting all over emergency medicine or about relaying my whole health history, which you can read here if you’d like. This article’s about a new world of practicing medicine — fueled by root-cause treatments leveraging cutting-edge science. Having already been adopted around the globe by brilliant medical doctors and other healthcare professionals fed up with symptom suppression, this new way of practicing medicine is what vulnerable young girls like myself could’ve and should’ve received while seeking treatment for so many seemingly unrelated symptoms.

This new approach is called Functional Medicine.

Most of my conversations these days gravitate towards topics of health and medicine. As a nutritionist, this isn’t surprising. But what does still surprise me is how many people I come across (especially those pursuing careers in healthcare) who aren’t familiar with Functional Medicine.

It’s still common to lump any protocol or practice outside the scope of the conventional pharmaceutical-based “emergency” model into the category of “Alternative Medicine,” which is still often associated with being unscientific or unfounded. Woo woo, if you will.

The Institute of Functional Medicine defines a Functional Approach as: an individualized, patient-centered, science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the underlying causes of disease and promote optimal wellness. It requires a detailed understanding of each patient’s genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors and leverages that data to direct personalized treatment plans that lead to improved patient outcomes.

A functional approach is based on the way our genes are impacted by and respond to our environment (what’s going on inside and outside of us.) The guiding principle is that if we can change our environment and our behaviors, we can change the way that our genes perform, thus eliminating the myriad of symptoms which are contributing to one of the many diseases we face.

A central piece to the “environment” is the patient’s chosen lifestyle. One major environmental factor which modifies a person’s gene expression, and I’d say the greatest lever in change, is their nutritional status. Nutrients can influence the expression of genes and they can influence the translation of the genetic messages into our body’s active proteins — thus altering that protein’s influence in controlling metabolic function.

Whole foods: the foundation of a functional healthcare approach

This means that our genes do not predetermine our health! Whaaat?!

Turns out we have more room for healing than we’ve been taught to believe. However, belonging to a culture which has normalized treating each symptom with a different drug can make the lifestyle changes involved in root-cause feel like an impossible feat left the the idealists and the privileged. I’m here to advocate for normalizing root-cause medicine.

I’m very grateful for the affluence which comes with a life in the modern developed world. That being said, we do live in a culture which doesn’t readily empower us with root-cause solutions. We’re often led to believe that certain people have great genes, while the rest of us are predetermined to certain diseases — oftentimes becoming self-fulfilling prophecies of these cultural paradigms and accepting diagnosis and treatment plans which offer us no real answers or solutions.

This is where functional health coaches and practitioners come in. This is where building supportive tribes becomes essential, and this is where revolutionizing our current medical model and food systems becomes imperative. Making healthy choices needs to be the norm — not a stressful form of social and cultural isolation or a privilege to white people with money.

To further elaborate why this new paradigm in health is so important and effective, let me give you more details into the functional model, based on scientific research:

No single gene controls the presence or absence of chronic disease. Our pattern of health and illness is determined by how whole families of genes are expressed, and that expression can be influenced and altered greatly by a range of lifestyle, diet, and environmental factors.

Due to the severity of our current illness epidemic, functional Medicine practitioners, such as myself, adopt a flexible perspective on treatment approaches. The use of drugs or surgery does not disappear entirely, yet lifestyle interventions assume a primary role when appropriate. The goal is to support as many people in AVOIDING emergency interventions such as drugs and surgery as possible.

Obviously, a nutritionist can neither prescribe drugs nor perform surgery. These options are left to the functionally-trained medical professionals working alongside us. Once emergency procedures are completed, if and when necessary, coaches and nutritionists take the core roles of support through post-surgery healing and transitioning off pharmaceuticals.

These holistic practices are prioritized for their lower cost as much as for their preventative and long-term health benefits. If we can avoid emergency intervention altogether, even better.

Being a systems-oriented medical approach, Functional Medicine focuses on seven core physiological systems. They’re interconnected and define how we as humans function. In the functional paradigm, a breakdown in any of these systems will lead to a host of symptoms we currently link to disease. Here are these seven:

Digestion and assimilation

Detoxification

Defense and Repair

Cellular Communication

Cellular Transport

Energy

Structure

At it’s core, Functional Medicine steers us away from the normalized identification with isolated diseases and encourages us towards seeing the interconnected process underlying each “disease.”

The current Western model of medicine as we have grown to use it works predominantly by addressing emergency situations, leaving practitioners and patients with little understanding or real agency towards healing the underlying interconnections. In fact, in conventional Western Medicine, the underlying interconnection is often overlooked or discredited entirely.

This has led to an epidemic of chronically ill people with absolutely no resources to heal their bodies and lives — instead being reduced to a life of poor health, pharmaceutical reliance, and oftentimes a shorter life-span. It’s basically failing us. This is not healthcare — it’s sick care.

And although the field known as “complimentary medicine” tends to be a step in the direction towards systems-based care, it’s often practiced within the same paradigm of symptom-suppression and management, only using supplements alongside pharmaceuticals. This was my personal experience seeing integrative doctors in my early twenties who offered me confusing yet expensive supplements and left me feeling disconnected and financially stressed. They didn’t take a systems approach nor did they get me involved enough to feel empowered by my choices.

One of the main ways which Functional Medicine principles affects healing is by addressing the following modifiable lifestyle factors, thus bringing our core physiological processes back into balance. These lifestyle factors are:

Sleep and relaxation (my favorites!)

Nutrition and hydration

Exercise and movement

Social relationships (tribe is ESSENTIAL)

Stress and the management thereof

These five factors make up the “environment” which surrounds our genes and contributes to their expression. By changing said environment, we’re telling our genes to express themselves in a ways which creates optimal health.

How rad, right?!

As a functional medicine practitioner myself, this is the kind of information which really lights me up! This is why I do what I do. I was failed by the medical establishment at a time in my life when I really needed a systems approach. Instead of blaming the system and living the life of a health victim, I’m choosing to play a role in creating a new system.

An important takeaway is that a Functional approach is not anti-Western Medicine and nor am I in my healthcare philosophies. I’m so grateful for doctors and emergency procedures. For example, because of emergency medicine, infant mortality is no longer the huge impediment it once was for our species. We’re living longer and aren’t as vulnerable to acute infections and accidents as our ancestors. The list of benefits modern medicine has afforded us in long.

On a very personal note, emergency procedures saved the lives of BOTH of my parents this last summer when my dad was admitted to the emergency room with walking pneumonia and the doctors discovered stage one testicular cancer. This required he have THREE emergency surgeries over the period of a few months.

Barely two months after this my mother had a brain aneurysm rupture unexpectedly and required an emergency flight to a hospital which saved her life with brain surgery and follow-up care. This landed both of my parents in surgical ICU’s in different California hospitals at the same time. Talk about modern miracles.

But these emergency procedures are oftentimes avoidable and unnecessary in the lives of folks with knowledge and support in preventative care. My parents neglected their health and will be the first ones to tell you that they contributed greatly to their emergencies. I believe that it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to embrace functional medicine in the hopes of alleviating all emergencies! But I do believe that it’s essential that we all know what our options truly are and the earlier the better!

I’ll use myself as an example: I have not seen a conventionally trained doctor since I tapered off all pharmaceuticals at age twenty. I have, however, worked with several functional clinicians and practitioners — all offering a whole host labs, supplements, laser treatments, dietary protocols, talk therapy, etc. All of these things kept me from any emergency states which would require I need the conventional Western approach.

Self-care, baby.

What we need for the everyday is an approach to medicine which empowers individuals and communities to understand how their bodies actually work. It shouldn’t be a privilege to live a life of health and biological resilience; it should be the norm and our future generations should expect this.

Just as international travel and WiFi are so ubiquitous to modern culture to be considered normal, I believe we must also normalize lifestyle medicine and expect all of our healthcare professions to take a Functional Approach.

Now I want to hear from you all — what do you know about functional medicine and how has it impacted you in your life?

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Sleep like you're on vacation

without leaving home

I remember so many nights, standing in line at my local drugstore, half-alive under the buzzing fluorescents, waiting to pay for an over-the-counter sleep aid. This was not the solution I wanted and left me feeling yucky the following day. But this had become the safety blanket which allowed me to feel a modicum of control over a problem impacting every area of my life: insomnia.

I haven’t taken a pharmaceutical in twelve years, but over-the-counter sleep aids became the chemical bandaids I resorted to on countless occasions. I’m far enough out of those woods to write candidly about it now with hindsight and compassion for the struggle so many of us face with sleep. And even if your sleep is decent, this article may still offer you some nuggets to get it to great.

Sleep disruption will do crazy things to us. It will drive us to make decisions out of desperation, fear, and impulsivity. And once we’ve developed patterns of sleep disruption, the impact of these patterns can feel like a tree with too many branches to manage, leaving the root causes neglected entirely. I offer practical solutions to address the root-cause of sleep disruption while also respecting the impact sleep has on our entire life.

When you so tired you one with the floor

I read the phrase “sleep like you’re on vacation” in Robb Wolf’s newest book, Wired To Eat — and loved it. Most of us associate vacations with relaxation and an escape from the world of adult commitments. It’s commonly reported that we sleep deeper and longer while on vacation because we don’t have our regular obligations and stressors to wake up to.

The whole purpose of a vacation is to take a break and recharge – which is exactly what our sleep and nighttimes should be. A study done in 2013 estimates that one-third of the population reports at least one symptom of insomnia.(1)

I firmly believe that relating to sleep in a whole new way — as a vacation from daily obligations and stimulation — is an essential first step in regaining our health, especially if we’re dealing with persistent insomnia. It certainly worked wonders on my own health.

As described above, the topic of sleep hits a very personal note for me, as it’s something I’ve struggled with since childhood. My sleep got so bad in my mid-twenties that my whole life started to deteriorate. Sleep became the primary indicator as to how everything else in my life was doing and I scheduled my days with the assumption that I might be tired. It took a lot of tinkering, patience, and committed lifestyle changes to get myself to where bedtimes are no longer a source of anxiety, but instead a yummy chance to let go of the day.

nighttime selfies are harder with mood lighting, encouraging us to unplug.

Here’s what I now believe: nighttime needs to be seen as a separate phase from day — with a different set of practices, rituals, and benefits. If I overstimulate myself and try to hold onto my day after it’s passed away, sleep and rest will start to feel like an obligation my adult needs to enforce upon my inner-child. This is what, I believe, leads a lot of people to reach for a bottle of Ambien.(2)

And in order to relate to sleep as we might a vacation, we need to recognize it’s important place in the lives of humans since the beginning of time. As far as we can tell, we’ve always had nighttime, darkness, and rest. It’s very modern to assume that we should stay up and pull our days’ priorities into our nights’ rest time. We need to recognize the ways this modern behavior is hijacking our health so that we can give ourselves permission to let go of the cortisol-producing obligations of our days.

Some Impacts of poor night-time routines

Hormone disruption.

Breakdowns in serotonin metabolism, due to inefficient dark exposure and poor conversion of hormones like melatonin & GABA.

Depleted melatonin, a hormone produced when our bodies are exposed to real darkness and colder temperatures. Melatonin acts as one of the body’s core antioxidants, it protects us from cancers and premature aging, stimulates human growth hormone, and increases lifespan exponentially – to name a few! It does SO many things. (4)

We run high cortisol, a hormone which is best-known as a key “stress-hormone.” Cortisol is important to many functions, but needs to taper dramatically at night and often doesn’t when we’re up exposed to light at night.

Appetite increase, due to hunger hormones being hijacked. When we sleep as nature intended and our metabolism is working, we’re equipped to fast for 8-12+ hours throughout the night. Nighttime signals satiety hormones, daytime signals hunger hormones. So what happens when we extend our days? Hunger hormones turn on cravings– especially for carbohydrates. (5)

Glucose disposal disruption.

Our insulin sensitivity is tightly linked to phases of light and dark. We’re more insulin sensitive when we have a balance of dark and light. Too much light sends our bodies the message that it’s endless summertime and we crave more carbohydrate.

Mood instability and Impulsivity.

Because, as you can see, so many different biochemical processes get tripped up when our sleep is disrupted, it should come as no surprise that sleep deprivation — from minor chronic deprivation to severe insomnia — is linked to mood disorders. (6)

We’re much more likely to be an asshole. Seriously — we could turn into this guy.

Basic steps to help you sleep like you’re on vacation

Master Your Days

Our whole lives can be defined by the quality of our days; the moment to moment choices and experiences we have and the freedom we feel we have over said choices and experiences.

Did we live in alignment with our deepest truest selves or were we out of integrity and checked-out? Did we execute our goals and move closer to our dreams?

Eat to balance blood-sugar, from our first meal of the day to our last. Each meal feeds into a hormonal pattern which starts the moment we wake up. If we start out as a rollercoaster, this will impact our biochemistry at night. Think low-glycemic.

Did we get out into the light and get ample Vitamin D production during the day? If we didn’t, it’s going to be much harder to let go of the day. I find it much harder to wind down and embrace a vacation from light, stimulation, and responsibility if I’ve been inside all day. It’s like my body is still waiting for the light exposure if I never get it!

Avoid comparing your health needs to others who seem to be “natural sleepers.” You don’t know what someone else’s health history is or what their health future health will be. If someone isn’t committed to healing, their standards may not fit yours. Know your standards!

Circadian Entrainment & Respecting the Darkness

Our health relies on our bodies’ ability to read environmental queues of light and temperature in order to do just about everything well.

Electrical lighting is VERY new to human history and it’s changed a lot of how our culture goes about life, providing us with opportunities and growth that would never have happened otherwise. It’s a blessing but needs much greater management.

In order to heal our sleep patterns, we need to respect the darkness and use electricity and digital technology more wisely.

Waking up at a reasonably early hour and getting enough sunlight is part of circadian entrainment, as is lowering your light exposure at night and unplugging as early as possible.

Utilize blueblocker glasses for any screen time or if you don’t have any option but to be under florescent lights at night. Humans are the only animal on earth to have created such an abundance of artificial light. All other species didn’t sign up for this. Think about how much nightly regenerating (both in humans and in other animals) is necessary for life to work properly.

Clean up your Diet & Supplement when Necessary

An mentioned above, from the time we wake up until our heads hits the pillow, eating will impact our sleep. The most common causes of sleep disruption — aside from the light and overstimulation mentioned above — is inflammation and poor glucose disposal. Both dietary issues. (7)

Eat a low-inflammatory, moderate to low-glycemic diet and consider saving your highest carb consumption for dinnertime, as we convert tryptophan from carbohydrates (getting it from protein is misleading), which we convert into melatonin and other hormones needed for sleep. (8)(9)

A personalized diet with whole food-sourced carbs (think rice or starchy veggies) will do the most for your sleep, as it has you remove the foods which spike blood sugar and cause the most inflammation.

Magnesium is crucial for sleep and should be gotten from diet AND supplementation if you’re dealing with insomnia.

If you consume coffee and tea, make sure they’re of the highest quality and begin tapering off of them as early as 10AM or 12PM –replacing them with calming herbs, adaptogens, and magnesium.

Have a Calm The Fuck Down supplement protocol. Here’s what’s in mine:

Essential oils in a diffuser was a HUGE game-changer for my bedtime routine — here’s mine. Below are my go-to oils, but there are many. Essential oils are so rad – have fun with it!

Sleepy Herbal concoctions. I make my own. I purchase herbs from the local herb shop and make them in a mason jar overnight or while I’m away during the day. I find them more refreshing when they’re cold, so I tend to steep them in advance for something like 8 hours, strain them into another mason jar, and store in the fridge. Each night I’ll pour myself 1/2 cup, oftentimes mixing my magnesium powder directly into the herbs and sipping while I begin my bedtime routine. Currently using:

Mood lighting ain’t just for sexy time — it should be a regular feature of your room. Get some candles or some fake candles, replace your overhead lights with lamps. Replace your fluorescent and LED bulbs with amber ones. Not only will your melatonin production and sleep improve dramatically, but friends and lovers will also feel better in your space! Whether it’s on our radar or not, we’re all impacted by bad lighting.

Keep your room decor minimal and clutter-free. Aim to limit associations outside of sleep and sex so that your biochemistry will respond to the queues at night that its’ time to rest.

If you’re sensitive to noise, consider a sound machine to drown out distractions. I’ve linked in the one that I use and it’s worked wonders! As soon as I turn it on at night, my body knows it’s bedtime.

Set an Unplug time and STICK TO IT. This has been essential for setting the tone in my room at night. My unplug time is 9PM and when I stray from this, I feel it the next day — even with blueblockers. Aside from the light, we need to cut ourselves off from the relentless demands of the external world. Keep a novel by your bed to read each night to wind down with instead.

In closing, this may feel like a lot so take it in strides and aim to make small changes here and there. It helps to know which areas you get tripped up by most. Once some new patterns are set and your sleep improves, you can tinker with how much flexibility you have. I find that I can get away with staying out later now 20% of the time because 80% of the time, my system knows what time it is.

At first, especially if you have poor sleep, you may need to go all in — 100% committed to your nighttime routine. Just remember, it’s also a commitment to your days and ultimately, to your future. This may help when you feel like early bedtimes mean you’re missing out and losing something.

Now I want to hear from you on all things sleep. How is your sleep and what do you do to support yourself in getting in the proper ZZZ’s?

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Growing up, I used to joke that I was born two hundred years too late.

This was a silly thing to say if you look at women’s rights, economics, short life-spans, and so many other factors pre-industrial women had to deal with. As a pre-teen, I was too young to understand history for this statement to make sense, yet there was a reason I would say this. Aspects to industrial society which didn’t feel right consistently left me with a feeling of displacement.

Aspects such as unquestioned use of electricity, the fast pace, overstimulation, sedentary lifestyles, mass-production of environmentally destructive consumer goods, the need for so many drugs, and what seemed to be a large-scale lack of systems thinking … drove this displaced feeling. Even if I wasn’t able to name it. One thing I wasn’t clear on was how far back I’d need to look to understand myself as an animal (albeit there’s value in learning any history.) It was looking back thousands of years which has helped me the most.

I made these jokes as a child and teenager who grew up seeing far too much dysfunction to feel well-adjusted in this culture. So I’ve often questioned if it’s personal trauma which would drive this displaced feeling. Sure, that’s part of it. But I believe feeling displaced in modern society is quite common and contributes to how we relate to and treat our chronic illnesses.

I also believe that the home I found within the ancestral health and ‘Paleo” community spoke directly to the little girl in me who would make such strange jokes. And within this community of research and application, I began to feel at home in my own animal skin. And I began to see my symptoms differently.

It’s easy to develop insecurities about our own value as a contributing member of society if we consistently show up as: out of it, tired, sad, foggy, inflamed, incompetent, anxious, prematurely aged, unfocused, distracted, infertile, restricted, depressed, repressed, bloated, (h)angry, addicted to various substances, or living without basic metabolic functions. These poor states of health can hijack our attempts at being a fertile mate, innate creator, or even a good friend. Although my views may seem extreme, it’s clear we’re more likely to have societal dysfunctions when so many individuals have biological dysfunctions.

Life can also feel isolating when we’re chronically unwell in a culture which promotes behaviors leading to chronic illness in the first place. This is where intentionally stepping back from our personal struggles and the norms by which we live and observing through a broader lens can make all the difference in our health pursuits.

Let’s call this broader lens an evolutionary template.

Before adopting an evolutionary template for healthcare, root-cause healing often felt isolating and burdensome. Myself and others with debilitating chronic symptoms were victims carrying the burden of self-healing amongst healthy masses. But the insights I gained through this broader evolutionary lens became a consistent source of empowerment for me, leaving me with greater agency to create applicable solutions to otherwise shitty life experiences.

Finding strength in our wildness.

Cause let’s face it, chronic illness fucking sucks. It can pull the rug out from beneath us, take away our futures, and deplete the confidence we all ought to have in our capacities to live a good life. You cannot chase your dreams when you can barely function. You cannot find a great love when you don’t love your own life nor your own tired face in the mirror. And what’s worst is that you cannot help but blame yourself for being so goddamn sensitive in such an individualistic culture with so much unrealistic images of what health looks like.

But what if we didn’t have to walk around with the belief that we’ve been dealt bad skin, bad teeth, bad joints, poor body composition, weak digestion, low libido, mood disorders, psychotic episodes, and so many other symptoms which often fall under the umbrella of “genetic predispositions?” I’m not implying we can always reverse or even avoid all of these issues… but what if understanding our history and evolution gave us a lot more power to do so?

I firmly believe that adopting some historical and evolutionary context can empower us to explore holistic options where we’d otherwise reach for the next pill to treat misunderstood symptoms. And until we become these holistic explorers, it’s impossible to know what’s truly possible for us and our health.

Root-cause healing offers no magic pill.

What this lens is and what it offers Us

An evolutionary lens is a mental model or framework which can be applied to human health and behavior. This lens offers us perspective and insights in the form of time-frames and scientific theories regarding human nature. It offers us clinical data to better understand human biochemistry and to understand why our bodies and minds respond to the modern world as they do. The world we live in has changed exponentially in a very small amount of time, yet much our human wiring has not changed.

From an evolutionary perspective, we’re currently living with a drastic mismatch between what our species has adapted to handle and what our current environment is providing. This mismatch forms the basis of individual and collective disfunction and chronic illness.

Yes, Homo Sapiens and all previous ancestors do have a lot of mysteries. There’s A LOT still left to speculation. However, we do have enough data to know that much of human history was spent without ANY of the modern conveniences we currently rely on for life. And many of these conveniences — as convenient and “normal” as they are — also hijack our hormones, appetite, immune system, and alter our very genetic expression.

There’s no doubt that life was no picnic for early man, yet we can learn so much by looking back.

This lens isn’t about adopting another religious myth to get all righteous — it’s the formula for a perspective shift which involves history, science, and a systems approach to life.

All of recorded history dates back no more than 8,000 years, yet looking back further than recorded history and understanding why I might feel and behave in the ways that I do has provided me with immense strength and meaning. My hope is that this lens can support others in a similarly powerful way.

How might the LACK of an evolutionary template create obstacles to healing?

When we’re unwell, we can play a blame game. We can place ourselves in a position where blame is a source of empowerment. Blaming — whether ourselves, the medical establishment, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, industrialization, bad science, greedy food corporations, animal consumption, genes or our parents’ choices, or even isolating foods like sugar and gluten — creates a myopic perspective. Blame often fuels dogmatism instead of wisdom. Despite the necessity to identify factors contributing to our illness in order to heal, we heal most thoroughly when we can access our innate wisdom and resilience, not when we dogmatically point fingers.

We can adopt dogmatic beliefs about diet. When we’re aiming to heal, dogmatism can be a big blinder. It’s very human, very common, and can creep in subtly so we don’t see how much it dictates what and how we eat, how we love, and what we believe — especially if we have disorderly eating tendencies. I see this a lot in people’s reactions to nutritional studies which make waves for a short period, often get disproven or revised, leaving many confused around what’s healthy. Nutrition science is new and we need more than epidemiology to understand what’s healthy for our species.

It is isolating to be sick without an empowering context. No biological organism can be subject to too many changes at once without problems arising in the organism. It’s nearly impossible to take into account all that’s determined by a culture which changes far more rapidly than any biological system could adapt, therefore we don’t actually know what someone’s body is doing when it seems normal and healthy by industrial standards until something breaks (as in acute disease.) Without an evolutionary lens, we often don’t consider how the biologies of seemingly healthy people are being impacted too.

So how can we use an evolutionary template as a framework for healing?

Start with some respect for (and investment in) the science and theories regarding human evolution. Painfully, about one in every three Americans doesn’t believe in evolution — despite clear and legitimate data proving that some form of evolution has taken place. There’s a lot that we don’t know about our history, yet we do have enough data to draw some pretty clear pictures at this point. This doesn’t have to discredit your religious faith.

Brush up on historical events. History can inspire you to relate mindfully to ubiquitous elements of civilization, such as: patriarchy, imperialism, agriculture, electricity, nuclear family structures, religious myths, bio-individuality, genetic mutations and metabolic differences, environmental issues, trauma and addictive behavior, basic human rights, psychological disorders, and even cultural trends in intimacy and love. So many areas of study make more sense – to me – when placed in the light of history and evolution.

Embrace personal growth — healing requires growth. Examine the ways which being domestic is hindering this growth and get curious about the ways you could be a little more wild. Where are you repressed? Consider an evolutionary template as a container to hold in place everything you learn about yourself and as a catalyst for a mindful lifestyle.

Develop your inner health Explorer. Consider genetic testing & learning about your personal ancestry. Talk to your parents about your family history, birth story, and grandparents. Begin to observe and question all the systems and resources you take forgranted and discern which may be negatively impacting you. And of course, reach out to me if you have any interest in exploring your health one-on-one. I offer both single sessions and a coaching package (which can, of course, be extended to longer work.)

Enjoy the immense privilege modern living accords us and the power we now have to impact future generations. Since this is all we know – enjoy being “modern as fuck.” If you have access to research, to eat well, and to curate your own health journey, you have immense priviledge. For all the problems the world faces, I still believe we’re blessed to be riding the waves created by our ancestor’s hardships. Because of women before me, I lead a very empowered life as a woman. Because of the work of my ancestors, I have far greater options than they could’ve ever imagined. And because of this, I’m called to live in gratitude and with a commitment to a saner future.

If we’re not empowered to heal, then we’ve missed the point.

Now I want to hear from you. How does history and evolution influence your daily life? How about your healthcare practices?

Find out why intimacy makes or breaks our health goals.

It was my first year at Burning Man and was, in many ways, a living dream. An event I’d fantasized attending for years was suddenly a reality and I was immersed in the indescribable magic which only a virgin burner could. The downside being: I was miserable much of the time due to conflicts with my ex boyfriend. I’ve heard the playa described as a non-specific amplifier of whatever is going on within us — not unlike psychedelics. For me this meant deep attachment wounds being reopened each time him and I crossed paths.

We had officially ended four months prior after a year and a half of consistent conflict. And as it’s so wisely said, some relationships end so poorly that they never truly end. In my case, four months was not nearly long enough for my nervous system to remain calm at the sight of him.

The first eight months of our relationship had been conveniently long-distance — leaving room for miscommunications and incompatibilities to remain hidden. We were passionate from the start and behaved (while together) as though we were committed partners. We shared an intimate community including close friendships with his housemates and spent enough nights together to store extra toothbrushes for each other. Albeit clearly loving and desiring each other, our entire relationship was one insecure land-mine after another.

We fought constantly and never reached the level of transparency necessary for trust to form — especially since we weren’t monogamous and he took other lovers. We were, as attachment theorists describe, in an anxious-avoidant trap. And this trap held me captive for over six months after our breakup, not even losing it’s grip during an otherwise magical playa experience.

Is your way of loving making you sick?

Despite my background in personal and early child development, it wasn’t until a year after this Burning Man experience that the book Attached was brought to my attention. This book and further research into attachment patterns has opened up a whole new world of understanding and, potentially, more empowered choices for me – should I commit to new ways of loving.

Humans are a social species, completely dependent on each other for basic survival. We are one of the few animals to come out of the womb completely reliant on our external environment for basic development and survival. And this dependence goes on for years, rendering us very vulnerable to those early care providers. Therefore, physical and emotional attachment plays a crucial role in our early development and in our healing capacities throughout our lives.

This is a topic well-worth educating ourselves on if we are seeking individual and global healing.

What is Adult Attachment Theory?

Adult Attachment Theory is a field of study within psychology which combines early childhood attachment patterns with the patterns we develop in our most intimate relationships as adults. Our early childhood attachment patterns are set in place within the first few years of life and tend to show up in our adult strategies for loving those closest to us – specifically romantic and sexual partners.

There are four main patterns of attachment which we adopt from our early years and one core pattern which dominates our adult relationships. Realistically, these patterns are flexible, fall on a spectrum, and can vary depending on life circumstances and the relationship dynamics we’re in. Here are the four types:

Secure: Securely attached adults tend to be the ones who had their basic needs met as small developing children. Their parents were consistent in their affections and boundaries, which allowed them to develop with the safety and support necessary to thrive. As adults, securely attached folks tend to find it easier to be in relationships and have less trauma and recovery time when romantic relationships end. They tend to have a greater awareness of their standards and values and are much less likely to find themselves in dynamics which don’t meet these values and standards. They can give and receive love more easily than an insecurely attached person, so building trust and intimacy is (on average) easier for these types.

Insecure avoidant: Although women can definitely be avoidant as well. avoidance tends to be more prevalent in men. I believe our culture contributes to a higher percentage of male avoidance — providing men with less opportunities to experience & express their emotions, more shame around their emotional needs, and more pressure to play the role as material provider. Unfortunately, avoidance is very common and permeates the dating pool, as avoidant types tend to be single most of the time. Avoidance can manifest in many ways: in one’s personality, behaviors when single, and as “deactivation strategies” with romantic partners. “Deactivation strategy” is a term used by theorists to describe the various ways which avoidants block threatening levels of intimacy or commitment. They rarely date other avoidants because there’s no emotional glue to hold the relationship together. Common patterns to look out for are: having a history of many short-term partners, having unclear boundaries and a lot of “undefined” relationships, lacking closure or getting over an ex, finding fault in their partners, isolation behaviors, or blaming others for their lack of intimacy. Since in reality it’s a spectrum, it can range from mild emotional neglect to severe isolation or even abuse within a relationship dynamic.

Loving an avoidant can feel like perpetually waiting for our love to be met.

Insecure anxious/ambivalent: Anxious types are the opposite of avoidant and tend to need a lot of communication and reassurance in their relationships – especially in the beginning when the connection is fragile. Anxious attachments are very common in families where the parents were permissive, inconsistent, or even neglectful in their parenting styles. Since they also run on a spectrum, they have the potential to be great partners because of their tendency to care for others and to put in the work needed to sustain a relationship. If they’re committed to healing their insecure patterns and finding a partner who meets their needs for intimacy, these types can thrive. However, anxious types are often avoidant magnets (guilty!) so they tend to attract a lot of avoidant partners whom trigger all their familiar childhood wounds. Anxious types often confuse the passionate “hooked” feeling they get from an avoidant with the safety they’re really needing in a sustainable partnership. They can get attached very easily and once invested, will put themselves through hell for a relationship even if it’s clearly unhealthy.

Anxious-Avoidant: This is a less common form which involves both forms of insecure attachment in varying degrees. Anxious avoidant types tend to avoid intimacy, yet they also lash out emotionally in a way that an anxious type would do when they’re safety feels jeopardized. These types tend to look more extreme and can involve abuse or serious co-dependency.

Observing our personal patterns is crucial for changing them.

I want to make it clear that these attachment styles all run on a spectrum and can change with life experience, healing work, and relationship upgrades. I find it essential to healing for us to know what our attachment patterns are at their core… and for us to address the areas which need respect and healing. This often means actively choosing to abstain from dynamics which trigger our default patterns and retraining ourselves emotionally, psychologically, and biologically to be in a safe and healthy dynamic where all our core needs are met.

What often happens is that we get sucked into a dynamic which feels good at first because it is hitting some familiar chords which tell us what love feels like. A lot of times we’re making our romantic and sexual choices from a deeply unconscious place within us which is familiar with a certain energy – even if it’s destabilizing or insecure. On the surface, we might think that we’re creating something different and healthy because the new partner (or even a potential partner) is showing up in a new way. My recommendation is to watch the ways which you react to new potential partners, as your reaction will give you a good indication of the underlying current playing between you.

I’ve been training myself to detect if a guy has some avoidant patterns based on how I react to him when he’s not around and how I react to his COMMUNICATION STYLE. The communication style, for me, is often the dead giveaway as to whether a potential mate is avoidant or not. I’ve come to the clear conclusion that I veer towards an anxious attachment in many of my romantic dynamics and my reactions. But not always.

Unlike many anxious types, I’ve done enough work with myself that I have no problem being alone or enjoying my own company. I don’t generally feel that I need to have a partner to enjoy life or feel inherently valuable. I also don’t cling to all friends and lovers and can assert my boundaries well with 75% of the people in my life. It’s that 25% of romantic partners which get me hooked and kick up the Insecure Kymber. This is when I know a guy has funky boundaries and avoidance patterns I’m getting sucked into.

It’s no one’s “fault,” per se, it’s simply that wounds speaking to wounds in some deeply primal way mimicking early survival patterns. Unless a partner and I come to an intentional agreement to work through our survival wounds together — which is more possible than many realize — we’ll surely fall into an insecure romantic trap and repeat the same traumatic shit from our past. I can go from being fully confident of my own worth, beauty, strength, autonomy, etc… to feeling completely distracted and insecure… all based on who I plug my sexual and romantic energy into. You can see why this impacts our health goals so much.

Health impacts of an insecure attachment

It’s not to hard to correlate the stress of long-term insecure relationships with the development of chronic illness. If you’re health-driven, you already know that stress has numerous health implications, especially in the long-term. When we have insecure attachment patterns prolonged by unresolved childhood trauma, we’re consistently pushing our bodies and psyches into a state of survival stress. Because we want and need intimacy for social and biological reasons, healthy attachments are crucial allies in building resiliency in the face of health and other life challenges.

Here are some of the basic symptoms which get exasperated by insecure attachments:

anxiety, depression, and problems concentrating

sexual shame and other problems with sexual functioning and related organ systems

Lowered immunity and lowered impaired methylation function

Endocrine disruption in both sex hormones and stress hormones

High cortisol and sleep disturbances

Obsessive compulsive behavior

Social isolation, low self-esteem, body dysmorphia, and other destructive behaviors

Digestive issues

Lowered quality of life and overall lower success rates in health goals, motivation, and self-care

How our culture perpetuates insecure attachments

Let’s not beat around the bush – WTF are we doing together?

As you may have gotten if you’ve read some of my other blog posts, I don’t see our current culture to be the healthiest container for deep and lasting healing to unfold. Therefore, we must create our own safe container, our own rules and lifestyles, and unfortunately unlearn a lot of what we’ve been taught since infancy… in the name of healing and growth. This applies as much to how we love as it does to how we eat and how we work.

This culture is obsessed with looking good and keeping up appearances. So, when it comes to intimacy and dating, we’re bombarded with strategies and rules regarding how we should conduct ourselves so as to find our life partner. Here are a few messages I see myself having to unlearn:

We should keep our insecurities and wounds hidden.

We should hold back our truths and desires until we’ve reached a certain level of commitment

We should guard our hearts and make sure that our partners check off ALL our boxes before letting our guard down

We should hyper-focus on labels and materialistic rituals for signs of value and security

We should invest in power-struggles and relate based on extrinsic motivators (i.e. I only care if you care)

We’re raised as conquerers, after all. Therefore, love must also be conquered, tamed, and made into a socially acceptable package which will guarantee us lifelong security . However, what a lot of these messages and strategies do is they keep our truths buried and they inhibit us from growing from each love – even potential love – we encounter. Growth is intrinsic to changing our attachment patterns.

What can we do to heal?

If we allow ourselves to be truly honest with how we feel and what we want, be it from a specific person or from a phase in life, we can free ourselves from the attachment traps we get sucked into when we repress our truths. All repression leaves us with is unconscious unmet needs driving us to manipulate a person or situation, either by avoiding or by clinging.

To create this freedom, we must first know what our core attachment patterns are. Adult Attachment Theory can be a great framework for this work and the book I linked at the beginning of this article is a great way to get started. If you’re already in a dynamic with someone whom you suspect is avoidant or you see yourself compelled towards loving avoidant types, this book is another great one which has given me understanding and tools.

And if you favor shorter articles over books, I highly recommend you check out Mark Manson’s article on Attachment Theory here, where he goes into each attachment style and offers suggestions and insights as eloquently as only he can. The important takeaways are:

Take a painfully honest look at your childhood and your romantic patterns. Get very honest with yourself around your choices.

Understand that this shit runs deep. We need each other and in a sick culture, it makes sense that that need will get distorted.

Forgive yourself for all the “mistakes” you’ve made in an earnest attempt to love and have intimacy with others.

Commit to changing the way that you love so that you can have greater access to health and growth. It’s going to be uncomfortable to love someone who doesn’t trigger familiar patterns.

Never stop loving just cause you aren’t perfect. We all have mommy daddy issues, and we all still deserve deep love and intimacy.

Now I’d like to hear from you – what did you learn from this article that you might take into your current and future relationships? Make sure to share this article with anyone who might benefit from it. Happy loving!

]]>https://www.kymbermaulden.com/what-are-adult-attachment-patterns/feed/0How Mindfulness Escalates our Healing — even if we Hate to Meditate.https://www.kymbermaulden.com/mindfulness/
https://www.kymbermaulden.com/mindfulness/#respondSat, 03 Mar 2018 20:24:16 +0000https://www.kymbermaulden.com/?p=3956Mindfulness can be defined as a state of active, open attention on the present moment. When you’re mindful, you carefully observe your thoughts and feelings without judging them as good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to your current experience, rather than dwelling […]

]]>Mindfulness can be defined as a state of active, open attention on the present moment. When you’re mindful, you carefully observe your thoughts and feelings without judging them as good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to your current experience, rather than dwelling on the past or anticipating the future.

In this article, I aim to make four points:

1) We can be mindful while doing anything – walking to the mailbox, getting some water, or taking a poop, for instance – and that’s the ultimate goal.

2) There are specific practices which train our minds and bodies for those times when escape is most common & habitual. These practices often involve rituals, intentional environments which elicit positive emotions, and often connect us with our inner-child.

3) Mindfulness in the form of sitting meditation may offer specific benefits for people prone to physical anxiety, hyperactivity, distractibility, and future-thinking.

4) Mindfulness is one of THE KEY lifestyle practices needed for healing and personal growth.

I’ll begin by sharing my history with mindfulness, which began early in life.

Since early childhood, I can remember myself to be an intense and highly sensitive person. I had big feelings and a propensity towards dreaming and planning.

The image of me to the right was taken when I was eight – the year I began public school and about the time I began to surf. My home life was so unstable that I ended up trading in much of my innate drive towards introspection and dreaming for external validation. Once I was placed in public school, I became a first-class social climber, leaving me very vulnerable to any criticism or praise. My identity became centered entirely around how others perceived me and I began to have a progressively harder and harder time being alone.

The main thing I could still do solo was surfing – which I did as often as possible. In hindsight, it’s clear to me now that surfing was my childhood mindfulness practice. Surfing became the sacred outlet for which I could channel my energy sos to navigate through complex social scenarios and to mitigate crazy family drama. It saved me. I became obsessed with cold salt water and the smell of sex wax. I would go to sleep at night and feel that lightness you feel as you drive through waves. It held me together and kept me present.

I still feel this way about being in the ocean – whether surfing or swimming – it is a sacred experience, calling me into full presence.

I was also seduced by the culture which came along with surfing. I covered my walls with images of pro surfers, hung out at the local surf shops, and would save up all my money to buy a shirt or rash guard with a Roxy label. The hip marketing and superficiality of the industry didn’t seem to taint the sanctity I felt in the water. Still to this day, the Roxy symbol and the smell of sex wax leaves me feeling like I just connected with a core part of myself.

To me, these positive associations with surf culture are similar to the associations I now have with sitting down in front a journal and a good pen, with stepping onto a dance floor resounding with bass – ready to dance, or with sitting down on a meditation cushion in a communal space. These are all my mindfulness routes back to self. And in these associations, I feel like I’m stepping into my purpose – which is to live as the realest expression of myself while connected to the whole – to something greater.

I believe everyone needs these associations to use as anchors, imploring us back to our core selves and to fully savoring our lives. My first memorable experience of mindfulness came in the form of surfing, so I may always relate to surfboards as holy tools of healing – even if I rarely make the surf these days. It’s a beautiful association which impacts me regularly.

Surfing got replaced for a few years by parties, boys, and drinking. I started smoking pot at an early age and had a hard time in school. Externally, I was the ultimate party girl kept afloat by superficial friendships and shopping trips. Internally I was overwhelmed and anxious all the time. By the age of sixteen, my needs for external validation had peaked and I was a fucking mess.

I didn’t know how to be alone, was consistently hurt by the low-quality friendships I created, and was obsessed with looking good. I cried at school a lot, had a lot of unrecognized metabolic imbalances, and developed an eating disorder which persisted for nearly eight years.

Two of my core character strengths are introspection and earnestness, leaving me with a higher level of self-awareness than I experienced in many of my peers at that time. These strengths drove me to seek answers and support early, while also driving me back to surfing, writing, painting, and dancing.

I always liked the ideaand image of sitting meditation and mindfulness, yet found it impossible to implement into my daily life. As much self-awareness as I had, I lacked the wisdom to know the true benefits in sitting through extreme anxiety. It wasn’t until my early twenties that my mindfulness meditation practice really took off.

Meditation began for me while living in San Francisco. I moved into a yoga ashram where meditation was mandatory for all residents. I knew I’d never make it to yoga or meditation on my own, so I placed myself in the environment where it was enforced. Residents were required to wake at 5:30AM daily for meditation and to attend at least four yoga classes a week. This year-long living experience was profound in all aspects of my life — even amidst extreme anxiety and unresolved eating issues.

This ashram became my container, allowing me to experience the full spectrum of being me – especially the internally crazy me.

After this, I was hooked on going within – even when it hurt like hell. I spent the following three years in Oakland practicing with a community of young adult buddhists. I began somatic experience work with a young buddhist who came to my house once a week and meditated with me in our practice room before each somatic session. Meditation became a crucial part of my life and a welcome escape from the societal pressures I’d taken on at an early age.

It got to a point where most of my friends were meditators and most of my social activities were tied to the dharma. I went on six different Vipassana silent meditation retreats over the course of three and a half years and became convinced that I wasn’t romantically compatible with anyone who didn’t meditate!

The image to the left is of me with one of my closest meditation buddies at age twenty-three. I was most at home when I was meditating or practicing some other form of mindfulness practice – such as silent hiking or cooking.

There were times when I felt like I was just too intense and sensitive for this world, so assumed I could always become a buddhist nun. I even shaved my head a number of times and researched a few different monastic options. It’s clear now that I’m not meant to be a monastic, but meditation was the profound salve I needed for the anxieties I’d been avoiding since early childhood.

About 15 minutes into a mediation session, I could feel my whole body relax into itself. My breathing slowed and deepened and my physical experience became all there was. After years of having intense feelings and anxieties which I felt pressured to hide or make “go away,” it was SO LIBERATING to sit with others where the sole purpose was simply feeling.

I realized for the first time that I’d been craving permission to be a deeply felt person. I’d been craving my own personal church which praised the parts of me that this culture didn’t seem to cater to. And now I found it inside of me. This felt essential.

As my physical health got progressively worse, it became clear that sitting meditation was not enough to help me. My buddhist teacher suggested that I couldn’t meditate my physical symptoms away and it became harder for me to sit with my symptoms. Truth be told, after obsessively sitting daily for years on end, I’d burnt myself out.

Out of complete necessity, I began to place more focus on understanding my chronic symptoms – which I document in my health history here if you’re interested. And for almost 5 years, I lost the ambition to meditate outside of the occasion social gathering. My needs took me elsewhere and I found mindfulness in the form of dancing and intimacy with others.

I learned a lot during this period about my own capacity for deep connection with others and the amount of healing which can come out of intimacy and being seen. This was the first time since childhood that my social life was one of my main focuses and, at the same time, wasn’t contributing to my suffering or disassociation from self. My relationships became conscious, deep, and healing — even if at times triggering as fuck.

Once I hit my saturn returns around twenty-eight…. I realized something profound about myself: I’m a future-oriented thinker. My natural tendency is to envision the future and I’m at my best when I’m striving towards goals and dreams. All of my health issues throughout my teens and twenties had made the future hard to predict. Illness can do that — pull the rug out from under our feet and leave us unable to envision a future we’d otherwise be dreaming about.

As I regained health and moved close to thirty, my future became top priority and the dreams which had been buried under years of survival stress came up – seeking recognition. Socializing lost a lot of it’s priority as my time became a precious dream-building resource. With this loss of social time, I also lost some profound time spent in mindfulness-based intimacy and I found myself getting caught in my thoughts more often again.

Sitting meditation came back into my life as if some silent universal alarm had summoned it. I HAD to sit in order to function. I felt anxious to do good by the dreams and visions which were now speaking to me and the game of “catching up” to where I thought I should be at the age of thirty was adding stress to my already-full schedule. This anxiety to build my dreams quickly and “catch up” was making my current circumstances harder to manage and was impacting my health.

What began as just a ten minute sit in the AM followed by journaling….turned into twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes before bed. I’ve also began to slowly design my own schedule to include all my mindfulness loves: swimming, surfing, writing, dancing, cuddling, doodling, walking while listening to music, etc…

These days mindfulness is a regular part of my morning and evening rituals and an invaluable resource I can access at any time in everything I do. It’s an evolving lifestyle choice and an expression of values. I’m building a tribe of value-driven like-minds and giving myself as many anchors as possible. Mindfulness forms the platform from which I create healing protocols for all my clients. It is essential to healing.

Here are some areas where mindfulness has clinically proven beneficial:

And if you’d like more about the data relating to studies on mindfulness, I recommend checking out Chris Kresser’s article on mindfulness here, where he more thoroughly elaborates on some of the studies I reference above and goes deeper into the physiological impacts of mindfulness practices.

]]>https://www.kymbermaulden.com/mindfulness/feed/0Ever think about how the Entertainment Industry impacts your health? Consider these points.https://www.kymbermaulden.com/how-the-entertainment-industry-impacts-our-health/
https://www.kymbermaulden.com/how-the-entertainment-industry-impacts-our-health/#respondSat, 23 Dec 2017 05:11:55 +0000https://www.kymbermaulden.com/?p=3911Like most people, I love a good story. I love to be entertained and emotionally provoked by well-scripted human drama. I can easily fall victim to infamous Netflix binges, taking my harmless commitment to one episode of Man Men and turning it into a shameful four-hour binder until midnight. By the time I cut myself […]

I love to be entertained and emotionally provoked by well-scripted human drama. I can easily fall victim to infamous Netflix binges, taking my harmless commitment to one episode of Man Men and turning it into a shameful four-hour binder until midnight. By the time I cut myself off, my personal problems have long-since been replaced by the complexities of Don Draper’s repressed male trauma and sexual dalliances. And suddenly I really need a whiskey, a cigarette, and some feminist pride.

Most of us have had some version of this experience since television made it’s big debut into modern human lifestyles. We’ve taken our species’ ancient drive towards drama and campfire stories to a whole new level with digital entertainment and globalize hollywood standards. And since entertainment serves a purpose vital to the human experience, I’m not opposed even to the hollywood versions — it’s all in the way that we choose to use it.

I believe most of us have at least a superficial understanding of the health impacts of late-night device usage and of becoming a “couch potato,” so this isn’t the focus of this article. I cover the health impacts of sedentary living and of artificial light here and here if you’re interested in those topics. In this article, I’d like to bring up a few ways which the entertainment industry and celebrity culture can fuck with our personal perceptions of reality and thus impact our mental and physical health.

Here we go.

Stars in most mainstream television shows & films are portrayed as slender, attractive, and oftentimes flawless, thus leaving viewers with the belief that this is normal and important.

We all know about this aspect of the media. Media floods us with images of how we should look and what we should buy in order to get us this standard of beauty. However, these media messages are much more obvious when they’re on a billboard, a Cover Girl commercial, or a tv clothing ad. What makes television programs potentially more harmful is that we start to invest in the humanity of the characters and we begin to relate their struggles and passions to our own. Most of us don’t look critically at each scene and scrutinize the fact that the young heroine in the show just woke up with perfectly straightened hair and flawless skin. But our unconscious will make note of it after a while.

Psychologically, we relate to the characters’ emotions as if they’re those of our friends and lovers – as if they’re our own. And we begin to send ourselves messages that having a blow out every single day and completely flawless skin is a normal thing to expect of ourselves. This is where our health can be really impacted by our entertainment choices. We start to work towards unrealistic and otherwise unimportant standards, which often take the place of more important goals — such as healthy hormone/energy levels, clear detox channels, biological strength and resiliency, and simply feeling good in our own bodies.

And while it’s true that some people do naturally have really fine skin and slender figures due to health or genetic advantages …… it’s not common in industrial society to have totally flawless skin and perfect figures. It’s completely unrealistic to have perfectly shiny locks straight out of a Pantene ProV commercial every day. Our skin gets freckles and even the healthiest skin will get some wrinkles and blemishes sometimes… this is natural. Our hair gets frizzy and oily and split ends appear – even on healthy people! Especially on healthy people because using natural shampoos which don’t leave plastic preservatives in our hair to give it that celebrity glow will leave us with “normal person hair.”

Characters in movies and shows rarely, if ever, consume foods which would actually uphold any true standards of health.

This ties in with my last point, as we are what we eat and our diets will realistically impact our appearance – especially in the long-term. But in entertainment, they often don’t have any correlation at all. How much commercial endorsement a show or movie gets will vary, yet I rarely see shows or movies in mainstream culture which regularly emulate healthy eating and living. So, not only are we sending our unconscious regular messages about how we should look, we’re also sending our unconscious totally whack signals regarding what is normal to eat.

I’ve been enjoying revisiting some of the shows I grew up watching on Netflix (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Seventh Heaven, Friends, 90210, Dawson’s Creek, Party of 5, etc.) Every single one of these shows portrays the characters eating Kellogs flakes, OJ, and muffins for breakfast, pizza, soda, and hamburgers for dinner. In some shows, such as The Vampire Diaries (yes, I like cheesy shows), every character drinks about half a bar on a regular basis, sending us the message that passionate attractive young people can stay attractive and high-functioning while also binge drinking regularly. It’s completely crazy.

Another example of a series that I went through on Netflix which left me with totally unrealistic perceptions was Gilmore Girls. Both women are beautiful, slender, in great health with high-energy … despite regularly binging on candy, ding-dongs, and leftover Chinese. Several times while watching I found myself craving crap I haven’t thought about in years – such as twinkies and pop tarts. Also appalling was watching a mother raise her daughter on crap that’s now implicated in the development of most chronic inflammatory & autoimmune diseases. The characters were emotionally relatable – yes – despite their energy, mood, and appearance being completely unscathed by the complete trash they subsisted on. This would never happen in real life…. but our unconscious mind doesn’t know the difference.

The ways which entertainment and media channels tell stories often lead us to believe that growth and healing are linear and climactic.

Have you noticed that most films and shows follow a specific plot structure? They get you invested in the characters and their stories, then they create drama and/or opportunities for you to feel disappointed or anxious, which drives you to root for some outcome or finale. The happily-ever-after outcome. The good guy lands the girl in the end. The diseased person goes through surgery and survives in the end. The unhappy person finally gets divorced or quits their job and creates their dream life. The End.

As I’m sure you’re aware, life rarely actually works out like this. Even when we win one big battle, life will give us more challenges or complications to test our patience and resilience. Even if we marry the man of our dreams, the real work begins after the honeymoon is over and we have to manage each other’s expectations. So it goes with every aspect to life which hollywood often paints in black and whites. This especially applies to healing from complex chronic illness, including trauma and addictions. It’s not always linear and it’s not something you attain and then you’re set for life.

There are set-backs, curveballs, and layers. Science is ever-evolving, offering us new insights and methods for understanding and healing. The more we learn about our inner-child, family history, and genetic ancestry, the more our healing possibilities expand and what we need will change. We need to anticipate that our symptoms, challenges, and needs will change. And growth will always be a necessity. The amount of time and commitment it takes to get us to a place of thriving maintenance is VERY personal and will never look exactly like someone else’s journey, especially if our illness is complex. The Hollywood script doesn’t apply to our real-world challenges, but again – our unconscious doesn’t know the difference. We have to consciously train our own expectations.

Some ideas for enjoying modern entertainment mindfully:

Healing does require balance, fun, and down-time, so I’m not recommending militant abstinence. But I DO recommend throwing out the cable altogether because of all the unhealthy adverts. Chronic disease is largely a result of modern living – and so is our modern entertainment industry. In many ways, they reinforce each other.

Get honest on why you use the entertainment industry in the first place if it’s habitual. Then look at ways you can get those needs met which include other forms of entertainment. Listen to beautiful or inspiring music, read books, or go on adventures with friends which can fill the social void you may be using movies and shows to fill. Having more meaningful conversations can give you that sense of humanity and drama you may be looking for from your flicks.

Make it a game or challenge to find all the cliches and limiting beliefs your favorite shows may be reinforcing. This doesn’t mean you shit all over the shows, but it’s just a practice to bring your unconscious into the conscious. You can also get clear on the ways that the show feeds you or what it is you want for yourself that you’re not getting in real life. Cheesy romance, anyone?

Aim to watch shows and movies with others. This will limit how much you watch, will keep you more present, and can alter what you end up watching and for how long.

Our perceptions and behaviors in life are shaped by the unconscious storehouse of beliefs we have under the surface. These deeper beliefs keep us from making healthier choices even when we consciously know we want to. It’s important, when healing, that we place awareness and intention on the unconscious beliefs we endorse and feed regularly and this includes the beliefs regarding how we should look in order to be the best versions of ourselves.

It’s also important to remember that mainstream entertainment is not driven by standards of health, but by economic incentives and emotional manipulation. If you can remember this, you’ll be less inclined to waste time watching trash, and you’ll also be less likely to unconsciously endorse the trash you do watch.